At around 9 a.m. this morning what appears to be an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated under a car that had just left the parking area of a supermarket on Taras Shevchenko Street in Sevastopol, the traditional base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Initial reports said the driver, who was believed to be a Russian naval officer, was very seriously injured but had been safely removed from the wreckage of the car and was being treated at the roadside but it was soon confirmed that he had succumbed from his injuries.
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In a statement made on Telegram, the head of occupied Sevastopol’s local authority, Mikhail Razvozhayev, confirmed “The man killed in the attack was a military man” before adding in another example of understatement: “the possibility of sabotage cannot be ruled out.”
A Kyiv Post source from Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) later identified the individual as 47-year-old Valery Trankovsky, a naval captain of the first rank said to have been the Chief of Staff of the Black Sea Fleet’s 41st missile boat brigade. It claimed the attack was the result of a successful special operation conducted by SBU operators following a week-long surveillance operation.
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The SBU statement went on to say that Trankovsky was responsible for the planning and ordering of cruise missile launches from the Black Sea directed at Ukrainian civilian targets. It said that a strike on a civilian shopping mall in Vinnytsia by Kalibr missiles in July 2022 during which 29 civilians including children died was at Trankovsky’s instigation as were several attacks against civilian targets in Odesa.
The SBU source said that in its eyes Trankovsky was a war criminal who was a perfectly legitimate target in terms of the laws and customs of war. They then added: “Payback for crime is only a matter of time. No occupier and murderer can feel safe wherever he is.”
Vessels from the 41st missile boat brigade, including the guided-missile corvettes Bora (ship no: 615) and Samum (ship no: 616), were among the large number of warships withdrawn from the port of Sevastopol and relocated to Novorossiysk on the Azov Sea in June. In February a sister ship the Ivanovets (ship no: 954) was destroyed by unmanned surface vessels (USV-drones) in an operation mounted by Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate (HUR).
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